I had learned of this one SACD from a facebook group:


Being a fan of cheesy 80s tunes this was right up my alley, but acquiring this SACD seemed difficult. It was available on Ebay, but for a considerable markup. After sifting through a google search, I found this one site:

Music CD HK

Most of the site is of course for CantoPop and Mandarin artists, but they do have a decent selection of SACDs of Western music.

Shipping to the US was a reasonable $10 for that double SACD above and arrived in a little over a week.

Will probably be ordering again from them soon since they have some other SACDs I didn't know existed like Lenny Kravits Greatest Hits and Tears for Fears - Tears Roll Down (Greatest Hits).

The HK SACDs have a little controversy about them.

Some were suspected to be simply CD 44.1Kz/16bit up-sampled to DXD/DSD to sell the same contents at a higher price.
The constant "Made in Japan" marketing gimmick is quite suspicious as well... It cleverly avoids the "Remastered in Japan".

It does happen a lot when the original songs were recorded PCM -- no other sources -- in the 90's.

Or when the publishers are just lazily recycling recent over-compressed remasters -- that are not a good fit for SACD.
The extracted files' DR (Dynamic Range) value usually gives it away.

Example for Tears for Fears: the DR values of the 1992 CD are slightly better than the SACD values (maybe CD layer?).
CD https://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/202647
SACD https://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/207944
Clearly not a good remaster/a remaster at all, they just increased the volume to the point of clipping.

Maroon 5 - Singles
https://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/217748
DR values are HORRIBLE on the CD layer, I wouldn't expect the SACD to be any better.


https://archimago.blogspot.com/2013/07/list-suspected-44-or-48khz-pcm.html
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/sacd-are-you-surprised-at-the-formats-recent-resurgence.257302/page-107#post-36213880

https://www.discogs.com/release/31855574-Maroon-5-Singles
Only deserves 4 stars. Overcompressed and mastered too bright. There should only be a few mastering engineers allowed to do the mastering for SACDs

https://www.discogs.com/release/28082680-The-Cure-Greatest-Hits
The same tracks sound better on my 80s compilation cd 'staring at the sea' which is like 3 euros. Dont give these people your money. This is the same bad master as the brickwalled original CD. Lazy and pointless


They typically don't sell well on Japanese 2nd-hand market, and are not mass-imported to Japan.
Japanese buyers avoid them.

I sadly don't own any to extract/analyze/compare by myself.

I would say "buyer beware", you might be buying a fancied-up, over-priced, over-compressed CD release.

Julien

I agree. When someone claims to have a new super HD version of something the first question should be what master they were using. In the early 80s most stuff used analog tape, by 1990 digital recording was standard…but it was of lower quality than single rate DSD so where does a SACD come from?

What makes it less likely that they did a good job is that this is a singles comp. It’s one thing to do a full on restoration of Close to the Edge, where everything was done the same way on the same day across the same album, but to do AAA mastering jobs of so many songs produced so differently from different formats across the entirety of the 80s…if anyone did do such a thing and do a good job of it I think it would be a big production. “1980s Pop Hits ~ The Steven Wilson Remixes”.

Darn, so these are kind of like the Chinese HDCDs from the 90s that actually weren't HDCDs.

I will say at least that the songs on the Still in Love compilation I have do sound pretty good and better than the CD version of the ones I have elsewhere.

Ah well, live and learn.